Sunday Morning Coffee

A bit of a departure this morning as Thanksgiving is coming up in a few days. We had a bit of a scare in the Nusbaum household the last week or so. Two of our dogs have had seizures in the last couple of weeks the latest being Trixie this past Monday right before we headed out of town.

Dogs have seizures, a previous dog of ours had a couple of them before our then-Vet put her on phenobarb, and sometimes it is a big deal and sometimes not (so says our current Vet). We live very close to an old mine (the Sheldon Mine whose heyday was a little over 100 years ago). One things that causes seizures in dogs and is also nearby as a byproduct of the mountain’s history (and elsewhere on the mountain that we know of) is lead. Given our situation, testing the dogs’ blood for lead became prudent. If the dogs had lead problems then we too could have lead problems which could be quite serious for our health and our finances.

A high enough lead level in our soil could require that we move from a newly worthless house (or close to worthless)–who would buy a house with a lead problem? A less severe solution, if the lead level was not too high, could involve having a lot of dirt hauled in and put down to reduce the direct exposure (not sure how viable this is) but of course we’d still worry about it.

Every so often people are forced to move in this fashion and the impact financially can be devastating. I’m not sure if insurance can help here but it could be a dealbreaker if you have to move from a worthless house that has a mortgage and want to move to a house you would own.

Fortunately the lead levels came back at zero so we are thankful for that but we still have a bit of a mystery on our hands–the blood work for both dogs came back as being “perfect.” We paid off our little cabin five years ago thinking that no more mortgage would offer a lot of flexibility for who-knows-what in the future not expecting that we might be forced to move (again this turns out not the be the case).

We bought the cabin for a very low price, had to put a lot down and so paying it off quickly became easy and logical and could have turned out to be crucial in terms of avoiding a financial deathblow. While I do not know if we truly would have had to move if this had played out differently we could have done it which is a long winded argument/example of why living below your means is so important. Had we bought what we could afford as opposed to what we needed we’d still be mortgaged up and a forced move as described above could have been ruinous.

So we are thankful we don’t have to move and thankful we could have absorbed the loss had it come to that. One does not have to have a lot of money to be well off. If all you pay for each month are various insurances, utilities and groceries (ie low overhead) then you have a much better chance of absorbing really big financial shocks.

The picture shows Ko’olawe off in the distance and Molokini a little closer.